This week, AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems announced it raised one billion dollars in fresh capital at a valuation of twenty-three billion dollars. This marks a nearly threefold increase from the eight-point-one billion dollar valuation the Nvidia rival had reached just six months earlier.
While the funding round was led by Tiger Global, a significant portion of the new capital came from one of the company’s earliest backers, Benchmark Capital. The prominent Silicon Valley firm invested at least two hundred twenty-five million dollars in Cerebras’ latest round, according to a person familiar with the deal.
Benchmark first bet on the ten-year-old Cerebras when it led the startup’s twenty-seven million dollar Series A in 2016. Since Benchmark deliberately keeps its funds under four hundred fifty million dollars, the firm raised two separate vehicles, both called Benchmark Infrastructure, according to regulatory filings. These vehicles were created specifically to fund the Cerebras investment. Benchmark declined to comment.
What sets Cerebras apart is the sheer physical scale of its processors. The company’s Wafer Scale Engine, its flagship chip announced in 2024, measures approximately eight and a half inches on each side and packs four trillion transistors into a single piece of silicon. To put that in perspective, the chip is manufactured from nearly an entire three-hundred-millimeter silicon wafer, the circular discs that serve as the foundation for all semiconductor production. Traditional chips are thumbnail-sized fragments cut from these wafers, while Cerebras instead uses almost the whole circle.
This architecture delivers nine hundred thousand specialized cores working in parallel, allowing the system to process AI calculations without shuffling data between multiple separate chips, a major bottleneck in conventional GPU clusters. The company says the design enables AI inference tasks to run more than twenty times faster than competing systems.
The funding comes as Cerebras, based in Sunnyvale, California, gains momentum in the AI infrastructure race. Last month, Cerebras signed a multi-year agreement worth more than ten billion dollars to provide seven hundred fifty megawatts of computing power to OpenAI. The partnership, which extends through 2028, aims to help OpenAI deliver faster response times for complex AI queries. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also an investor in Cerebras.
Cerebras claims its systems, built with its proprietary chips designed for AI use, are faster than Nvidia’s chips.
The company’s path to going public has been complicated by its relationship with G42, a UAE-based AI firm that accounted for eighty-seven percent of Cerebras’ revenue as of the first half of 2024. G42’s historical ties to Chinese technology companies triggered a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. This bumped back Cerebras’ initial IPO plans and even prompted the company to withdraw an earlier filing in early 2025. By late last year, G42 had been removed from Cerebras’ investor list, clearing the way for a fresh IPO attempt.
Cerebras is now preparing for a public debut in the second quarter of 2026.